Monday, June 6, 2016

Toni
(Royalty Hightower) is an 11 year-old girl growing
up in the rough projects of inner-city Cincinnati. The prepubescent
adolescent keeps out of trouble by hanging out at the local
recreation center with her big brother, Jermaine (Da'Sean Minor) and
his BFF, Donte (Antonio A.B. Grant, Jr.). Trouble is, Toni has
developed a reputation as a tomboy because she's spent so much time
training to be become a boxer, mostly out of admiration for Jermaine,
an amateur champion. Everything
changes the week Toni decides to join the girls' dance team that also
practices in the gym. Since she is already athletic enough, her
initial challenge rests in just learning the steps and perfecting the
choreography. Meanwhile, a side benefit is that she gets to enjoy the
sort of female camaraderie she's missed by being immersed in a macho
sport dominated by guys. Unfortunately,
Toni still has a hard time finding acceptance by the tight-knit group
of girls. And that endeavor is further frustrated when her teammates
start suffering from mysterious fainting spells. Will the newcomer be
fully embraced, or might she be blamed for this inexplicable
development?

So
unfolds The Fits, an ethereal, coming-of-age drama effectively
exploring a tentative
tweener's rigorous rites of passage. The movie marks the
promising directorial debut of Anna Rose Holmer who has managed to
make a decent movie on a micro-budget. Short
on dialogue, long on atmospherics, The Fits feels like a solid
student flick that hasn't quite been fleshed out to feature-length
format. Nevertheless, future star Royalty Hightower 's inspired
performance as the protagonist, here, is reminiscent of Kerry
Washington's in her first picture, Our Song, a similarly-modest,
ghetto-based production.

A
mellow meditation on a beautiful, little black girl beginning to
bloom!

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The Sly Fox Film Reviews

KamWilliams.com

The Sly Fox Film Reviews publishes the content of film critic Kam Williams. Voted Most Outstanding Journalist of the Decade by the Disilgold Soul Literary Review in 2008, Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic who writes for 100+ publications around the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, Canada and the Caribbean. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Online, the NAACP Image Awards Nominating Committee and Rotten Tomatoes.

In addition to a BA in Black Studies from Cornell, he has an MA in English from Brown, an MBA from The Wharton School, and a JD from Boston University. Kam lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and son.